


In Memoriam

by eye_of_a_cat



Category: Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-29
Updated: 2018-05-29
Packaged: 2019-05-15 00:25:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14780117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eye_of_a_cat/pseuds/eye_of_a_cat
Summary: Leia's memory of her mother.





	In Memoriam

_It's the light she sees first. Only the flicker of a screen that catches her eye for a moment, but it's enough._  
  
When Leia was very young, and her world ended at the grey walls circling the palace gardens, hunger and terror simply didn't exist. She knew the words, but the words were empty. Her life was good, then, and safe, and quiet - even the sounds of a galaxy tearing itself into bloody pieces couldn't reach a royal nursery.  
  
Not hers, at least.  
  
_If the room hadn't been empty, she wouldn't have stopped and she wouldn't have noticed. On most days she'd never have been alone, there or anywhere else. But today, as it happens (and why? She can't remember now - a game, maybe, hiding from her nurses), there's no-one else around. Just one half-curious girl, curling her toes into the thick weave of the carpet, and the woman talking._  
  
Of course, it wouldn't have lasted. Her parents didn't idealise naivety any more than she does, and no-one could have grown up in a political family without learning. It wouldn't have lasted, and regardless of what she remembers, it's unlikely she was ever completely ignorant then; surely they couldn't have given up discussing politics over dinner for a week, never mind her whole childhood? But it's easiest to remember a revelation, and this one was hers.  
  
_The woman continues to speak, as oblivious of Leia's attention as she is to the cameras fixed on her oddly-painted face. Leia recognises the surroundings (the Senate chambers) and a few of her longer words (government, Palpatine), but it's the woman's voice that holds her still. She's asking for something, and whatever it is must be the only thing in the galaxy worth wanting._  
  
She doesn't remember the year she first saw the clip, although it must have been early in the Empire's time if the networks were still showing it. (They stopped soon after the Merrol riots; suggestions were made.) The second time was in a damp-smelling bunker on a Rebellion outpost somewhere that time and hot water forgot, long after the palace on Alderaan was gone. She knew who the woman was by then, and she herself was a former senator and wanted criminal, a world away from that little girl seeing the clip for the first time. Still, as she sat cross-legged on a floor thick with oil and grime, breathing in the stink of unwashed sweat from all the people packed around her, she watched the same way she had as a child.  
  
_There's anger, too, in the woman's voice (and Leia hears 'massacre' and 'atrocity', and knows she wouldn't have understood either, no matter what she remembers). Real anger under the calm words. Leia realises that these are demands she's making, not requests, and realises for the first time that the galaxy around her is suffering. Things must change, the woman says. Leia finds herself agreeing._  
  
She'd replayed that memory a hundred times since Endor, trying on Luke's insistence to pin down what he called Force-sensitivity and what she just called recognition. And maybe it was neither; how many adopted children imagine their birth parents in every exciting face they see, anyway? All she remembered was _knowing_ , and she supposed the mechanics of that were open to speculation.  
  
_And there's something else. Leia doesn't truly understand the problem, nor the solution the woman demands, but she understands that it won't happen. Through all her passion, there's a resignation in the woman's words; a tired sadness, as if she's already seen her defeat. Leia, not accustomed to losing, feels a thin flicker of defiance run down her own spine. With the confidence of a child, she knows that when she takes this woman's place in the Senate, she won't give up._  
  
The clip didn't last long. A few minutes, at most.  
  
But that's enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on LiveJournal in 2006.


End file.
